RBP3 [SPOILERS] Hannibal of Byzantium (Bobchillingworth, ManiaMuse & SleepingMoogle)

[SleepingMoogle]

Agreed. Maya needs to improve their outlook a bit. I don't think anyone not in the Hydra wanted this alliance of necessity, but it's not like we have much choice in the matter. Hopefully once we join up our chariot with theirs it will raise their spirits.

Anyway, they sent a message this morning:

Since we couldn't be here yesterday for chats, I thought I'd send you a summary of what we talked about internally.

Cull's RL issues aparently resolved, so he can hopefully handle the turn playing things better from here on out, freeing up my time to do the other things!

Getting involved in this war is going to drastically change our micro plan unfortunately. So it goes I guess. Ref didn't have time to look at micro with me tonite, but he sent me an updated sandbox. Unfortunately, he's better at this stuff than I am. I've been working on this for several hours, but... as you all know, a determined army of squirrles could knock over our civ at the moment, (you're probably getting tired of hearing it, but it's true) and that has to change. As soon as we attack India, they'll designate us priority target #1, so we're afraid we might have to detour for hunting. I can't give an updated ETA on when that would cause math to come out yet, but we're hoping to find a way for T79.

RE: The war on India. This is mostly directed at Exploit and somewhat at Byz. We should see the copper next turn, I think. I know the plan is for us to just deny them the copper, but, are we sure they don't have another copper somehwere? Do they have horses (or do you know). If they whip out a couple chariots, we wont be denying them the copper for long... Exploit, I'm assuming you have nothing but warriors yourself and no units to spare? Will you have any in the next 4 turns or so that could arrive? Do you have any screenshots of their area?

RE the attack itself: Now, clearly if we can almost for sure raze a city (we think its there) of theres by the copper, or if we can poach a pair of workers, we probably should do so immediately, otherwise... should we pretend to be clueless and wait for Byz's chariot? Really, if we're going for India, it makes sense to me to hit them with everything we have (ovb Babs with only axes halfway around the world make zero sense for this). Even though we're probably the 2nd best teching civ in the block at the moment, we'll definitely consider whipping out a bunch of shock axes if the group is going to go for the throat here, but I need to know what's going on, because I'm not whipping us into the dust for a 1v1 battle if we dont have an organized plan of attack against them.

I talked to Swiss a couple hours ago and he agrees with me that we really need to concentrate on India.

Also, another thing we discussed...do we have anyone doing HBR? Thats a REALLY important tech and we NEED someone doing that asap.

I'm going to go take a nap now because I'm nodding off at the keyboard. I'll bb in 3-4hrs.

We were supposed to go out later today, but I don't think I'd better with everything that's going on =/

~Maniac

And my reply:

This message was sent to Maya, Babylon and Sumeria. Please feel free to forward it to other members of the alliance. (Do we actually have a name for it already? I've been referring to us as the Heracles alliance in our team thread so far)

We feel your worry Mayans.. the situation for Byzantium is pretty much the same but unless we act fast, 2-3 chariots will not be enough to harass India. Unless you have a strong indication that an attack from Hydra members is imminent though, you should be relatively safe. In any case, we have one chariot going southeast to hopefully join up with you in the next two turns or so. The other chariot is going north to scout out (and hopefully harass) Egypt.

At the moment we have swapped to Masonry, given that Rome will finish IW faster than we would have. ETA is 6 turns. After that we can start researching HBR if no other civ has started on it yet by that point.

Also, we should probably start synching our movements for the split turn timer. The Incans look to have the latter part of the turn, so we should move our military units in the second half of the turn as well. That way there won't be any confusion which side gets to play when.

-SleepingMoogle

[SleepingMoogle]

Turn 59 should be pretty interesting for us. Feros will both expand its borders and get to size 2. Given the developments over the last couple of days, we may have to revisit our plans somewhat. Here's the turn plan that is currently on the first page:

Turn 59 (Iron Working in ~16 turns, 45 gold)

Anoleis: Builds farm (4T)
Barla Von: Builds cottage (1T)
Chellick: Builds cottage (done)
Delanynder: Moves E-NE-E onto river plains tile builds a cottage (3T)

Citadel: 4/28 food, 74/100 production (Settler)
Working rice [5/0/1], sheep [4/1/3], grassland hill [1/3/1] and plains hill [0/4/1]

Feros: (Border expands) (Size 2) 0/24 food, 44/60 production (Granary)
Working farm [3/0/0] and spices [2/1/1]

Obviously the tech research is different now. The two things that are worth considering are 1) Do we want to swap Anoleis to getting the Stone hooked up asap instead of building a second farm and 2) Do we still want to use the delay the Granary somewhat to max out on food.

I still favor the latter for now, given how food-poor Feros is, but getting the Stone resource up and running by the time the Granary finishes is something we should definitely consider.

Also, I briefly discussed this with Bob last night, but rather than have the Citadel start on a Granary after we finish the Settler, I'd like to build a chariot instead while working max food for a few turns. When we are close to size 5, we'd whip the Citadel for 1 pop to finish it, and regrow to size 4 the turn after. At that point we should let the citadel grow to size 5, and start the next Settler at that point. Anyway, given our poor defenses, it's more important getting that Chariot out than slow-build the Granary.

[SleepingMoogle]

The timer actually fully ran out before the turn rolled over for the first time. The Mayans were the only ones not to finish their turn. Whether they left something unmoved or simply forgot to hit enter is unclear at this point.

Anyway, turn 59:

First of all, Feros both grew to size 2 and expanded its borders this turn. And it looks like we've found what it to be our native source of gold:



We'll have to discuss with Exploit at some point, but I'm fairly sure we can claim the source for ourselves. In any case, Feros is currently working the farm and spices tiles. If we do that this and next turn, and switch back from the spices to the horses on turn 61, we'll finish the Granary exactly when Feros has 12/24 food in the box. Anoleis is farming the grasland tile north of the city, and Delanynder is headed towards the rice tile, where he'll finally finish the road next turn.


Over to the Citadel (which is no longer in the top 5 cities, heh):



Chellick has now finished our first cottage. The second one will follow next turn, however we need to continue working both mines to finish the Settler in 2 turns. We'll start work on a third river cottage, and link up the third city site to our road next work while the Settler completes.

Scout-wise, Jenkins is still heading west. Based on the screenshots the Friendly kittens provided us with, I think we'll reach the Incan borders two turns from now.

Finally, chariots. The Agincourt is still on its way north (if we are going to contact France with it at some point, we may want to consider renaming it ).

The Normandy had a more interesting development. A barb warrior came out of the fog on the interturn, positioned such that he was exactly on the tile where he'd be able to attack. I had to attack it instead; we won with 2.8/4 health remaining, and gained 2XP so we can promote the next turn. Hopefully that will cut down healing time to just 1 turn, or remove it completely. And an extra promotion will surely help against India.

[Bobchillingworth]

Probably will be best to make another farm at feros before working the stone- want to get to size 3 quickly and have enough food to manage and recover from an emergency whip quickly if need be.

I'm worried that Maya will spoil our attack on India by parading their chariot about Indian borders until we arrive, ruining the element of surprise. I've told them that they should consider holding back in the fog, but they don't seem too keen on doing so for some reason. You'd think they would want their chariot closer to their borders for a couple turns, considering how vulernable they apparently are to "strong breezes".

Good to hear about the 2nd Normandy promo- let's keep moving foward to India, we can promote to Shock if we meet any more barb warriors on the way, otherwise promote to either Combat II or Shock once we reach India.

One of you may want to make sure we're on the same page with Kyan & Babylon if you have the time, RE: war plans.

I can't see the image of "our gold" at the office, but I'm going to say that yeah, it's ours :P

[Bobchillingworth]

Lord deliver us from our allies.

Maniac ran ahead and made contact with India when our chariot is only 2 turns away, sending them some bizzare, possibly drunken, rambling greetings.

Kyan, Mali, and Maya are convinced that France is opposed to us, and want to send a first contact email lying to them that Babylon and Mali are declaring war on France and inviting them to join, which stupidly manages to both lie to a potential ally for no real reason and alert England to our actual planned attack on England, which Babylon is confirmed for, and Mali may be joining in on. I sent out an email urging sanity in our dealings with France. Hopefully we can reach them first, sigh. Even if they are against us, which very well might be the case, telling them about a fake attack that closely resembles our real attack is so moronic that it boggles the mind.

Kyan also wants us to declare on him in 10 turns, apparently as part of his silly "misinformation" campaign, with the war ending once we're ready to move on England, which wouldn't be terrible except that if we're going to coordinate troops movements it would be nice if our armies could occupy the same tile without fighting to the death. Also Babylon is thinking of just gifting us a bunch of axes and having us go on alone, which would make troops logistics a little easier, but also would force the axes to leave from our territory, which isn't well positioned for moving a 1-mover stack to England, and also is impossible if we're at war with Babylon. We could gift chariots to Babylon instead, but I don't want to lose the GG points.


Finally saw that gold image. That resource is ours, and if exploit tries for it, it's going to be war once this giant alliance bullshit finally blows over. But I'm hoping he won't. He also seems to have randomly broken his own "no screen shots" rule and sent us a really useful one showing how to get to India, and where he thinks we should strike. We may want to consider it.

[Bobchillingworth]

I may have been a little too hard on our allies. Apparently Maniac didn't mean to actually meet India, but Exploit miscalculated where the Indian city was, and so contact was made. Kyan has agreed that telling France about any sort of attack on England is a bad idea, which might be moot anyway, since it looks like we get to be the ones to reach France first. We should be reasonably circumspect in any information we supply them at contact.


Okay, Mayans are going to gain visiblity over the Indian city next turn, and will decide depending on what they see whether to move in next turn.

As for ourselves, we should use the following Exploit map to reach the target:




Lots of emails and chats to read through if you guys are interested. The emails are of the most importance, although I would refer to the chat I had with Exploit, as we discussed our future borders and current strategy in depth. Exploit does want to settle claim the gold resource, which he argues is closer to his capital. I made it clear that we also intend to secure the gold, but we both decided to revisit the issue when we have less pressing concerns. Exploit proposed that neither of us settle the immediate area of the gold until turn 80, with us beginning discussions on turn 75 regarding who can settle what, and for what compensation. Possible deals that I can think of are an agreement to settle equal distances from the gold and simply culturally fight it out, or a allowing one team to settle a preferred spot that grabs the resource, which they then have to gift to the other team.

Can we agree to not settle the area until T80? I didn't think we were going to anyway, but I figured I would double check with you guys first. Exploit says he isn't settling north for a while anyway.

Oh and Kyan wants us go 100% gold after masonry, to fund someone else's research- I say that we determine our own research path, and I'm interested in making a run for monotheism- if we get Judaism to pop in our 4th city then it may make the border with Kyan more favorable for us than anticipated. And we can't really be faulted for where the game decides to spawn a religon, right ? Even if it shows up somewhere else, we still can spread it around to all our allies- even Feros might have real long-term contributing potential with a holy city.

[SleepingMoogle]

There's a lot of signs in that screenshot. It looks like we won't be going after the copper city then, but after the one settled on the Stone instead?

Anyway, turn 60 came along and it looks like we got a few points for settling Feros back in T40 (there's a 20-turn delay before you get credited for the tiles coming under your control).

The turn in itself was rather uneventful. Jenkins continued west, and can now see the borders of Mali bleeding through the fog. We'll contact them next turn (they don't show up on our foreign advisor screen yet, which makes sense as we don't have visibility on one of their controlled tiles this turn) and should immediately ask them if they went the Poly-route towards Priesthood. If they have, I would propose giving Monotheism a shot once we can trade for it. It'll help us in maintaining our borders, and we can always promise to spread the faith around (and build the shrine later on for big $$'s).

Domestically, not too much happened. Our second cottage is complete now, but we need to work our mines for one more turn to finish the Settler. After that we can start using them to boost research. We also finally finished roading the rice tile (that only took 40 or so turns).

This should be the last turn we moved our military units in the first half of the turn. War with India is only a few turns off now, and I'd rather not get caught up in double-move debates.

The Agincourt is on its way up north. I dislodged our Warrior guarding the citadel for now, to make sure the Settler won't run into any barbs on its way south. Once the city is safely founded, he'll go back to the capital. If anyone decides to attack a capital they have no visibility on in the next turn or two, we can always recall the Agincourt. The Normandy is on it's way south. I haven't promoted it yet, but I assume we want Shock, right?

[Bobchillingworth]

Yes, we want shock- check the lastest two emails in our inbox, looks like Maya will be taking a whack at the indian copper city, with very good odds to destroy it next turn. We should continue on to the stone city.


Looks like Kyan has abandoned his idea of us attacking him, based on some of the numerous flaws that Maya and Inca pointed out for him- I'm glad they did, I didn't consent to any such fool thing myself, and I didn't want to get into a big argument with Kyan.

Mali went for Meditation, alas. I still want us to go for poly -> Mono, tho- someone else in our group is taking HBR anyway (either maya or babs I think)


This is starting to get pretty exciting! For our war declaration on India, I suggest we channel Star Trek (2009)- "Hi India, we're Byzantium (declares war)"

[ManiaMuse]

How about,

"Dear India,

The Spectres have been granted planning permission to construct a new hyperspace bypass in this region of the galaxy.

Unfortunately [City name] is situated in the way of this project and must be demolished.

Demolition will begin with immediate effect.

Kind Regards

The Spectres"

[SleepingMoogle]

They're called Mass Relays in the Mass Effect setting. Other than that though